Where's the Candy? Econ Ed Month Meets Halloween

In combination with October being Econ Ed Month and the arrival of Halloween 2023 in just a few days, Turner Business decided to produce a couple of blogs dealing with Halloween-related research affiliated with the Turner College's Center for Economic Education, which is led by Turner College economist Frank Mixon. Both of these studies involve the trick-or-treating tradition that characterizes the last day of October each year, with the first focusing on how the decay of social norms has impacted societal rules governing trick-or-treating activities. The second relates to the choice made by some neighborhood residents to avoid the hassle of trick-or-treating activities by leaving home (or turning off all of the lights) after placing a bowl of candy on the porch that is distributed to trick-or-treaters on an honor system basis. This choice typically involves placement of a sign like that above.

In a 2018 article appearing in the Journal for Economics Educators, Mixon and Cody Ward, a graduate of the Turner College's graduate degree program in organizational leadership, point out that such a bowl of candy exhibits the characteristics of a communal good. First, the candy in the bowl is "rival in consumption" given that candy taken from the bowl by one trick-or-treater is no longer available for other trick-or-treaters to take and enjoy. Second, the bowl of candy is also non-excludable in the sense that no individual trick-or-treater can exclude (legally) the other trick-or-treaters from accessing the candy in the bowl. With the criteria for a communal good being met in this example, it is not surprising that the homes that deploy Halloween candy in this fashion see their stocks depleted long before the stocks of other homes whose owners distribute candy in person or face to face.

The trick-or-treating example described by Mixon and Ward differs from the typical "tragedy of commons" story in that depletion of the candy in the bowl is the goal. The issue at hand in this case involves how much of the candy is taken and enjoyed by a given trick-or-treater and how quickly (i.e., at what point in the evening) the contents of the candy bowl are depleted by the collective group of trick-or-treaters. To discuss these issues, Mixon and Ward develop a vignette involving Charlie Brown and Lucy van Pelt, the famous Peanuts cartoon characters. In that story, Lucy takes most of the candy, leaving very little for Charlie. As the study explains, the last few units of candy taken by Lucy are enjoyed less by her than they would have been by Charlie, had he been able to access them. This problem would not have arisen had the homeowner remained home and governed access to the bowl of candy.

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